William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut informs us that “The Secret Service Text Cover-Up Keeps Getting Bigger and Bigger,” as the mass text-deletion scandal now encompasses our Department of Defense and our Department of Homeland Security as well as our Secret Service. One observer wonders if folks have a “moral right to presume the worst about Trump entities that deliberately destroyed federal evidence regarding January 6,” but “moral right” is a bad way of putting it – we as Americans have a duty to ensure the survival of our own civilization. “Trump entities” would enjoy the presumption of innocence if they stand trial in a court of law, but Americans need not give them that presumption either at the ballot box or the water cooler. Hey, that’s the marketplace of ideas.
Texas jury finds right-wing blowhard Alex Jones guilty of defamation over his repeated assertions that the Sandy Hook school mass murder was somehow not real, and orders him to pay nearly $50 million in damages. Stupid Texas law will limit that outlay, but it’s still a big deal anytime someone pays a price for their evil works. And if you’re thinking Alex Jones only paid that price because he’s a relatively small player in the system, so is almost everyone else who deserves his fate. Why keep Alex Jones or Steve Bannon around when a hundred other jerks can rise up to take their place? Hell, they only keep Donald Trump around because he won’t go away.
When I hear that New York state’s Health Commissioner says the single case of polio they’ve found so far could well mean hundreds of other folks might have it, all I can say is: heckuva job, Andrew Wakefield! Mr. Wakefield, you may recall, is the ex-scientist who manufactured “data” finding a “link” between the MMR vaccine and autism; anti-vaxxers ran amok with this “research” and convinced numerous Americans that all vaccines were dangerous. Fast forward to the summer of 2021, when numerous crybabies refused to take the COVID vaccine and thus helped keep us all in danger to this day, and we can see clearly the damage anti-vaxxers have done. What’s next, smallpox?
West Virginia man gets a little over three years in jail for sending threatening emails to Dr. Anthony Fauci and ex-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins while they were both federal officials. Let the record show that this man was no expert dancer on the free-speech-or-terroristic-threat high wire. And while it’s great that we got justice here, how about we go after everyone who threatened a schoolteacher or school board official over masks or vaccines or “critical race theory”? Because good teachers won’t come back until we prove we’ve got their back.
Ho hum, FactCheck.org finds too many folks using misrepresented vaccine safety data in order to claim that the COVID vaccines have “serious side effects” they don’t actually have – but this time the database is German, not American. And naturally Tucker Carlson, who jumped all over misrepresented data coming from our VAERS database last year, jumped all over this one, too, proving that those who would exploit the rage-added never rest, nor do they feel shame when we expose their lies. It’s enough to make you think that Jon Stewart’s method – good old-fashioned ridicule! – is the better way.
Finally, in an act of political aikido I can’t believe came from Democrats, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the Inflation Reduction Act couldn’t contain a $35/ month insulin price cap for non-Medicare patients and still comply with the Byrd Rule concerning budget reconciliation – but Democrats left the cap in the bill anyway, daring Republicans to force them to take it out, and Republicans dutifully took the bait. 60 votes would have overcome the point-of-order raised by Sen. Graham (E-SC), but only seven Republicans voted with Democrats to overcome it – meaning that headlines like “Republicans strip insulin price cap from bill” are now completely valid both in newspapers and campaign ads! Of the seven Republicans who voted to keep the insulin cap, only two – John Kennedy of Louisiana and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – are up for re-election in 2022, so you have to wonder what goes through the minds of people like Ron Johnson, Marco Rubio, Chuck Grassley, and Rand Paul, each of whom have formidable Democratic challengers this year. (The insulin price cap is particularly in Kentucky Democrat Charles Booker’s wheelhouse, for reasons you might easily imagine.)
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